Origins

The Herald Sun newspaper is the product of a merger in 1990 of two newspapers owned by The Herald and Weekly Times Limited: the morning tabloid paper The Sun News-Pictorial and the afternoon broadsheet paper The Herald. It was first published on 8 October 1990 as the Herald-Sun. The hyphen in its title was dropped after 1 May 1993 as part of an effort to drop the overt reminder of the paper's two predecessors that the hyphen implied and also by the fact that by 1993 most of the columns and features inherited from The Herald and The Sun News-Pictorial had either been discontinued or subsumed completely in new sections.[3]

History

The Herald

The Herald was founded on 3 January 1840 by George Cavenagh as the Port Phillip Herald. In 1849, it became TheMelbourne Morning Herald. At the beginning of 1855, it became TheMelbourne Herald before settling on The Herald from 8 September 1855 - the name it would hold for the next 135 years. From 1869, it was an evening newspaper. Colonel William Thomas Reay was sometime literary editor and later associate editor, before becoming managing editor in 1904. When The Argus newspaper closed in 1957, The Herald and Weekly Times bought out and continued various Argus media assets.[4] In 1986, The Herald's Saturday edition - The Weekend Herald - which had adopted a tabloid format, in order to distinguish it from the Monday to Friday editions' broadsheet format - was closed.

The Sun News-Pictorial

1990 merger to form the Herald Sun

In its prime, The Herald had a circulation of almost 600,000, but by the time of its 150th anniversary in 1990, with the impact of evening television news and a higher proportion of people using cars to get home from work rather than public transport, The Herald's circulation had fallen below 200,000. This was much less than that of the morning Sun.

With the only alternative option being to close The Herald, The Herald and Weekly Times decided to merge the two newspapers, and so after one hundred and fifty years, ten months and two days of publication, The Herald was published for the last time as a separate newspaper on 5 October 1990. The next day, The Sun News-Pictorial published its last edition. The Sunday editions of the two newspapers, The Sunday Herald and The Sunday Sun, were also merged to form the Sunday Herald Sun. The resulting newspaper had both the size and style of The Sun News-Pictorial. Bruce Baskett, the last Editor of The Herald, was the first Editor of the Herald Sun.

After a progressive decline in circulation the afternoon edition was cancelled, the last edition being published on 21 December 2001.[5] The News Corp Australia-produced mX had filled part of that gap, being freely distributed of an afternoon from stands throughout the Melbourne CBD until 12 June 2015, though generally not available outside that area.

Circulation

According to third-party web analytics providers Alexa and SimilarWeb, Herald Sun's website is the 74th and 125th most visited in Australia respectively, as of August 2015.[8][9] SimilarWeb rates the site as the 15th most visited news website in Australia, attracting almost 6.6 million visitors per month.[9][10]

Collectible items

Over the years, the Herald Sun has had a range of magazines, pins and memorabilia (usually with an outside partner) that could be obtained by either getting it out of the newspaper, or using a token from the newspaper to collect or purchase the item. Items that have been a part of this scheme include:

Controversies

Greens and drugs

Shortly before the 2004 election, the Herald Sun published an article entitled "Greens back illegal drugs" (Herald Sun, 31/8/2004) written by Gerard McManus which made a number of claims about the Australian Greens based on their harm minimisation and decriminalisation policies posted on their website at the time. The Greens complained to the Australian Press Council. The text of their adjudication reads:

In the context of an approaching election, the potential damage was considerable. The actual electoral impact cannot be known but readers were seriously misled. [...] The claims made in the original article were seriously inaccurate and breached the Council's guiding principles of checking the accuracy of what is reported, taking prompt measures to counter the effects of harmfully inaccurate reporting, ensuring that the facts are not distorted, and being fair and balanced in reports on matters of public concern.[11]

Contempt for source protection

In June 2007, two Herald Sun journalists, Michael Harvey and Gerard McManus, were found guilty in the Victorian County Court of contempt of court after refusing to disclose the source of a story the pair wrote in the Herald Sun on Australian Government plans to scale back proposed veterans entitlements. The controversy resulted in agitation to change the law to introduce "shield laws" in Australia to take into consideration the journalists' code of ethics.[12]

Cartoonist's Williams caricature

Following Serena William's claim of sexist behaviour by umpire Carlos Ramos at the 2018 U.S. Open women's final, the Herald Sun's cartoonist Mark Knight drew an illustration of the match which was described as sexist and racist. In the cartoon, Williams is shown to have smashed her racket whilst a baby's dummy lays on the floor. Knight's illustration has been compared by some, including the political cartoonist and Washington Post columnist Michael Cavna, to illustrations popular during the Jim Crow era in the United States[13]. Additionally, Knight is also accused of having "whitewashed" William's opponent, Naomi Osaka, who is of Japanese descent. Following this, there was significant condemnation of both the Herald Sun and Knight for the use of this image by the author J. K. Rowling and Rev. Jesse Jackson amongst others [14]. The Herald Sun defended its decision to publish the cartoon and two days after its initial publication, the cartoon was reprinted in part along with a series of other illustrations by Knight on its front page under the caption "WELCOME TO PC WORLD"[15]